How the early employees set the tone for every hire that comes afterwards.

What is it?

Steven Jobs used to talk about the concept of The Bozo Explosion often. The basic idea is that if you hire great employees, they become leaders that will hire people that are just as good if not better.

A hire that’s only ok, could still grow to become a leader in the organization, but (as Jobs would say) “B players hire C players, and C players hire D players.”

How to avoid it

Like I said in my post on Feedback, feedback is a snapshot of how a person acted in that moment, it’s not a reflection on who they are inherently as a person. Personally, I believe that this is also true of employee performance. Under the right circumstances, anyone could be coached to be an “A player”. Not all of those factors are in our control as leaders though. If someone is willing to engage with you in that kind of conversation and make changes, then you’ll be back to having a team of “A players” in no time.

One of the causes could be a lack of confidence or imposter syndrome. On my team, we don’t avoid imposter syndrome, we lean into it hard. But I’ll talk about that next week.

How I avoided causing a bozo explosion

During a hiring cycle when I was still new to managing, there were a few candidates for IC positions we really liked, and they all had more impressive work experience and educational qualifications than me. I knew it was objectively the right choice to hire these people, but I still felt the imposter syndrome in the back of my mind.

I talked with my boss, saying “I don’t know how to manage someone with this experience. They have so much knowledge!”

The first thing my boss said was “But they don’t know the company”

That was the start of a mindset shift for me. As a manager, I don’t necessarily need to be the subject matter expert, that’s not my role anymore. As Andy Grove would say, my only job is to improve the leverage of my team. If I didn’t know how to manage a more experienced person, I could learn to do it, even working with the more experienced people specifically to develop a plan.

So what now?

Now that I’ve had a few years to think on it, I don’t feel that imposter syndrome anymore. If I can hire a team that some would consider a “threat”, that’s the best possible outcome. More skills on the team means we can give away more Legos and work on more new and interesting problems.